This is part of a quote I came across this morning while reading one of my favorite books, Figuring by Maria Popova. HERE's her website. [By the way, I'm a 59M, married 25 years.]

For context, Popova is a 38-year-old Bulgarian-born and American-based writer, thinker, critic. She is a materialist in the best sense of the word, meaning she believes that we are all created from stardust, to use her image, and we form together in different ways in different times throughout history. While I personally believe more than this is true, I also believe science proves her out.

A brief paragraph on the top of page 143 (for any of you who have the book) summarizes for me much if not all of what an affair is or should be about. Popova was discussing the affair that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller had in the mid-19th century. Popova writes:

This false notion of the body as the testing ground for intimacy has long warped our understanding of what constitutes a romantic relationship. The measure of intimacy is not the quotient of friction between skin and skin, but something else entirely--something of the love and trust, the joy and ease that flow between two people as they inhabit that private world walled off from everything and everyone else.

In the three affairs I've had, two started with a desire for that "friction." They quickly turned into joy and ease. The third started with the (initially platonic) joy and ease, then included the skin-to-skin, and then developed into love through trust.

Yet anyone who reads about Popova's "something else" form of intimacy knows that it can become consuming if we are foolish. That's what Emerson's and Fuller's became, and that's what my third affair was like, in part, even though I don't regret a minute of it. But I've seen other men post here that once they feel that "something else entirely" form of intimacy -- as I did with my last AP for the first time during adulthood, which is the same as saying it was the first time -- and once it ends, then they chase it. It might have happened naturally the first time, but this time they try to recreate it. And that chase, itself consuming, becomes detrimental to his family and ultimately to any woman who might become his next AP.

I have a couple take-aways from Popova's quote:

• Men would do well to avoid thinking about, let alone posting that they want, sex with an AP right out of the gate. Guaranteed that Waldo didn't meet Margaret for tea and then find the nearest Concord Inn.
• Waldo ended up feeling closer to Margaret than to his wife and even to his children. That to me sounds like disaster. Popova wrote earlier in this episode that "the richest relationships are often those that don't fit neatly into the preconceived slots we have made for the archetypes we imagine would populate our lives--the friend, the lover, the parent,..." I want that private world I get with an AP, but that private world has its boundaries; in fact, that's what gives it form and substance and meaning and, ultimately, value. If those walls are too permeable, it can lead to disaster. An affair can quickly turn to obsession or, worse in my opinion, absorption.

I don't think this post is merely me indulgently thinking out loud to others who are in this lifestyle. I know for a fact -- from their posts -- that there are men who (A) post mostly about wanting sex, and (B) post about how amazing their current AP is to the point that they are the last to see that they have become absorbed into their affair, perhaps to the detriment of showing any kind of affection at home.

Emerson said about being at home: "Most of the persons whom I see in my own house I see across a gulf."

That shit is scary.